ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

“The modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms,” said Jackson Pollock in 1951. “Each age finds its own technique.” Drawn from the holdings of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, this exhibition shows how the challenge was taken up by Pollock, his peers, and the generation that came after them. Working in Europe and America in the wake of the Second World War’s cataclysm and horror, the artists included here did nothing less than reinvent painting.

The methods they found were as varied as the age itself. What they had in common was a doubt-tinged faith in the power, and perhaps the necessity, of abstract art. Pollock’s radical method of pouring, dribbling, flinging, and splattering paint onto canvas gave them permission to redefine what painting could be, even as his towering example made them wonder if they could continue, in the words of poet Ezra Pound, to “make it new.”

Make It New is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with the Clark Art Institute.